Apple
AAPL
recently announced that its annual Worldwide Developers Conference 2021 (WWDC 2021) will take place between Jun 7 and 11. Continuing last year’s all-online format, the conference will offer a glimpse into the future of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS.
Apple also announced that Swift Student Challenge is now accepting submissions. The Challenge presents an opportunity for young developers to demonstrate their coding skills by creating a Swift playground.
The WWDC event garners significant attention, not only from developers but also from analysts and investors, globally. Although Apple’s share price has not shown any sharp movement during the event historically, the company’s ability to pull off surprises in terms of software development and updates makes the event a crowd-puller.
WWDC 2020, being an all-online event for the first-time in Apple’s history, reached more people in real time, in its history. Per CEO Tim Cook, the event attracted 22 million viewers across all of Apple’s streams. The company was able to put together 72 hours of video content for developers and hold 4,500 person-to-person interactions across 227 virtual labs.
The 2021 event is expected to witness the same trend. This year’s conference will include keynote and State of the Union events, online sessions, 1:1 lab offering technical guidance, and new ways for developers to interact with Apple engineers and designers.
Markedly, Apple’s robust developer base of more than 28 million has been instrumental behind the growth of App Store traffic. Apple garnered more than 620 million paid subscribers across its Services portfolio at the end of first-quarter fiscal 2021.
Moreover, Apple is not only expected to provide updates on its software at this year’s conference, but also rumored to make hardware announcements, particularly related to Mac.
Notably, during last year’s WWDC event, Apple announced its plan to switch from
Intel
INTC
CPUs in Macs to its custom silicon of its own design, based on the ARM architecture. In November, at its One More Thing event, Apple launched a new MacBook Air laptop, a new 13-inch MacBook Pro laptop and Mac Mini desktop computer, all powered by its in-house M1 chip.
Additionally, Apple is expected to launch its first virtual reality (“VR”) headset in 2022. Moreover, this Zacks Rank #3 (Buy) company is reportedly working on augmented reality (“AR”) projects to extend its footprint in the fast-emerging AR market, and is anticipated to release its AR devices by 2023. You can see
the complete list of today’s Zacks #1Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here
.
It is rumored that Apple might provide some details about these upcoming devices at this year’s WWDC. Markedly, the iPhone-maker’s entry will intensify competition in the AR/VR devices market, currently dominated by the likes of
Facebook
FB
, Sony and
Microsoft
MSFT
.
Markedly, Apple is expected to update its device portfolio in 2021 with the rumored launch of a refreshed iPad Pro line-up, this April. Additionally, the company is reportedly planning to launch Air Tags or Apple Tags (ultra-wideband trackers) and a new pair of AirPods.
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